Some fossil photos - gastropods, theropod teeth, crinoids

[Aurelius]

I've set-up a studio in the spare room. My house is tiny, and my spare room is like something out of sodding Lilliput. It's also lined with boxes all the way around, so the workable space is about 3.5 feet by about 6 feet, which is not adequate. However, I've done my best with some experimental techniques.

 

 

 

Gastropod with a smaller one washed into it. I collected this myself from Barton on Sea, in Hampshire, UK. I have better specimens, but I like the smaller one being there. This one is about an inch across.

 

 

More Barton on Sea Gastropods. 

 

 

 

 

Crinoid ossicles, pentacrinites from Charmouth, UK. This is highly magnified, this is about a centimetre.

 

[Aurelius]

Finally, a rather poor photo of two very small Kem Kem theropod teeth. I'm experimenting with ways of photographing these effectively, and I haven't got there yet. 

 

[Bullsnake]

I could only wish to do so well! Nice pics!

[Darktooth]

I think you did a great job!

[Tidgy's Dad]

Makes my efforts look quite pitiful by comparison. 

Excellent work. 

[ynot]

I agree with the others, nice pictures.

Nice fossils too!

[izak_]

Great pics and fossils, well done

[Wrangellian]

I'd say your experiment has succeeded! Wish I could do half as well.

[TqB]

Great images, I'll have to up my game!  Would you be able to share some of your tricks?

[Vieira]

Wow. Fantastic pictures

 

Congratulations

[Troodon]

Nice all around. I do like the effect of the dark background and lighting

[LordTrilobite]

Beautiful photos!

[PFOOLEY]

9 hours ago, Aurelius said:

...the workable space is about 3.5 feet by about 6 feet, which is not adequate...

Sufficient enough for taking lovely images. 

[RJB]

The peoples who are most critical of themselves are usually the best at what they do.  Very nice photo's.

 

RB

[Fossildude19]

I wish more of our members could take photos of their fossils, and have them come out like yours! 

Excellent photography!  

[Herb]

Great pictures

[minnbuckeye]

Your wonderful photography has left me wondering about your experimental technique. Is it a trade secret?

[FossilDAWG]

They are all great photos, I have no idea what you are talking about regarding the "rather poor photo".  I especially like the second one of the shells, but then I am a shell-o-phile!  

 

Don

[Kane]

Exquisite photography. Do say more about your setup and equipment, as I am sure it would be something several of us would love to replicate!

[Heteromorph]

Beautiful pictures! What kind of lighting did you use? 

[Aurelius]

Thank you all for the kind comments. I'll be posting more photos of different fossils soon.

 

@TqB @minnbuckeye @Kane @Heteromorph - here's a quick guide to how I did it. I'll go into some detail, so much of this you'll already know, but I thought perhaps it could be useful to others in future if I went fairly in-depth, so please don't feel patronised. I feel a bit like I'm revealing some tricks of the trade, but sod it, I learned many of my skills from others!

 

This photo gives a basic overview of the makeshift 'studio', but it's so cramped it's hard to make out what's what. Note that I use a few pieces of expensive equipment, but none of it is absolutely necessary to do most of these types of photos, so I'll cover that as I go through.

 

 

The camera is a Nikon D800, but any digital SLR would do the job. I've got that on a bog standard tripod.

 

Lighting wise, I have a Godox AD360 on the left, which is firing into a circular reflector, to provide a more diffuse light. If you've not seen an AD360 before, it's basically like a standard flash, only bigger, much more powerful and with a huge battery pack which allows you to cycle thousands of times without recharging, and with a very quick recharge time. It's popular with wedding photographers. But a smaller flash would also work; I'd just have to leave longer recharge times between each shot, and have piles of rechargeable batteries on hand!

 

The flash on the right is a super-cheapo Neewer TT520. These can be picked up for about £30/$42. They have built in optical slave mode (so they can automatically fire when the other flash goes off), and you can use a £10 cable to connect them to a Godox AD360 battery (although you must have rechargeable batteries in it at the time). I've used a £15 fabric 'snoot' with the flash, which directs the light into a focused beam. I can then use as a back-light, or as a backup to the Godox. 

 

For some shots, I use a third flash. The individual gastropod was photographed with a flash behind it on the table, to the left.

 

Both main flashes are mounted onto normal lighting stands with an adapter. I'd probably mount them onto tripods instead, for increased flexibility, if I had the space.

 

For general close-up work, I use an good quality prime lens mounted onto extension tubes. The tubes give you a much closer focusing distance, enabling you to get really good close-up images without additional equipment, but at the expense of infinity focus (which isn't required for this kind of work). You can mix and match them to get different minimum focus distances. I only have two working ones, but I can't afford to get any more at present.

 

 

For closer work, I use a cheap 80-300mm zoom lens. I mount a 5x or 10x infinite microscope objective onto this, using a mount I made myself by removing the glass from a filter that fitted onto the lens, and using epoxy clay to secure a suitable adaptor inside it. If I was into doing things elegantly, I'd just have obtained adapters with the correct filter size and screwed them together, but sometimes it's all just too much fuss and expense, and this is totally secure and it works. I also added black card to the reverse of it to stop internal reflections as much as possible.

 

 

 

This was set-up to shoot the crinoids yesterday.

 

 

The key to this kind of close-up work is focus stacking. If you take a single shot, the depth of field is tiny - in other words, most of the image will be out of focus. That's just down to physics, and whilst you can mitigate it by stopping the lens down (except when using a microscope objective, when you can't), image quality quickly begins to deteriorate, and it will never have much of an effect at high magnification. 

 

So to get around the laws of physics, you have to take a number of photos, with fixed focus, at different distances from the object. The higher the level of magnification, the more images are required. With the images of the teeth above, I used three images. The crinoids (5x magnification) used 54 images. At 10x, I will often take 250 images. You can then join the images in software. I use Zerene stacker. The end result is an 'impossible' image which has much wider depth of field than you could ever achieve in a single shot.

 

I use a specialised piece of hardware to move the camera back and forth, called a Cognysis Stack Shot (https://www.cognisys-inc.com). This moves the camera in absolutely tiny increments (as little as 0.01mm) automatically, taking a picture each time and with piles of options. However, it is very expensive (I got it years ago, when I actually had disposable income). You can do this work with very cheap alternatives, like this macro rail: 

 

 

A system like this works great with the extension tubes, but becomes a lot more difficult when you're using the microscope objectives - it's very hard to be sufficiently precise, although a skilled person could probably gear the system down more. I took this image using the macro rail above, I think at 5x. However, the Stack Shot makes things much easier.

 

 

In the photos I posted originally, I made a black background by folding pieces of matte black card. Having another piece of card slightly overhanging the fossils, with a deep empty space behind the fossils, meant that the background came out jet black.

 

So that's it, basically. Image stacking, bounced light and light modifiers. It often takes a bit of experimentation to get it right, but if you have a camera, a tripod, a macro rail, a couple of flashes and some black card, you're pretty much away. 

 

Sorry if the above is unreadable waffle, but let me know if there are any questions.

 

[TqB]

Many thanks for that, extremely useful.